


Let's Call Her Fluffy

by jailikechai



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Fluff, M/M, SO MUCH FLUFF, dean and cas get a dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5962999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jailikechai/pseuds/jailikechai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel comes home with a dog. Dean is less than enthusiastic. Or so it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Call Her Fluffy

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to write something else about Dean and Cas getting a dog, and then I found this in my unfinished drafts. It was too cute to pass up. [This](http://www.ronmiller.net/found-brown-white-dog.jpg) is the picture of the dog I used as a reference.

“Guess what happened to me today?”

Dean hears his husband’s gravelly voice call out excitedly from the front door and he heaves himself to his feet and peers down the hallway from the office full of unfinished bookshelves towards the front of the house.

Cas is holding a dog. A panting, bright-eyed, mud-covered mutt that’s large enough to look ridiculous in the man’s arms, but not too large to hold onto. Dean steps closer before leaning one shoulder on the wall and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Did it involve a dog?” Dean asks dryly, his lips quirking into a smile at the way Cas’s goofy grin mirrors the dog’s happy expression. Cas struggles to shrug a shoulder and keep his hold on the dog at the same time.

“Good guess,” Cas affirms, doing his best to lean over the dog in his arms to kiss Dean hello. Dean takes pity on him and grabs hold of his cheeks to press their lips together. The dog squirms. Dean rolls his eyes.

“You can put the dog down,” he sighs.

“Oh thank god,” Cas moans, carefully setting the dog down on the tile floor, and rolling out his sore shoulders. The dog wiggles her whole body gleefully, shaking her thick fur, colored in soft white and tan splotches, from head to tail, loosening flecks of mud that scatter over the floor. Her floppy ears perk and her long fluffy tail wags as she trots towards Dean’s knees and tilts his head up to sniff him. Dean ignores the gentle snuffling around his legs and focuses on his husband.

“I’m ready for that story now.”

Cas runs a hand through his tousled mop of dark hair and smiles sheepishly. 

“Well, I was on my way home from the shop, and I was walking past that alley between Demane and Leek street, you know, the one right by the new bakery that opened last week? And I heard this noise, kind of like a, arroo,” Cas mimics the sound of a whining dog, the dog whips her head around to stare, intrigued, at the man, and Dean presses his lips together to keep from laughing, “and something crashed on the ground, so I go to look. And there’s this dog and she’s stuck under some old junk that fell off the second floor landing from the building, and she was crying and I thought maybe her leg was broken or something. So I get her out, and oh my god, I swear she’s just the cutest dog I’ve ever seen, but I know how you feel about pets, so I was all, no, she’s ok, I’m gonna just go home, but then she starts following me down the street, but she’s limping really bad, and then I go to cross the street and she’s following me and she almost gets hit by some maniac driving like they own the whole road...”

“And now she’s here,” Dean finishes when Cas finally pauses for breath. Cas shrugs again and Dean leans forward to brush some dried mud off his chest. The dog is once again sitting at Dean’s feet and looking up with wide, chocolate brown eyes, her tongue hanging out of her mouth as she smiles at the man looming over her. Dean pointedly ignores the animal. “How’d she get so muddy?”

“No idea,” Cas says, crouching down to rub at the dog’s floppy ears, loosening even more mud and causing the dog to lean blissfully towards him. 

“I can’t - we can’t keep her,” Dean tells them, and gets two pairs of sad eyes - one pair brown and one pair blue - in return. 

“Yes, I know,” Cas mourns, patting his hand down the dog’s back. “I figured maybe she’s somebody’s pet already, I mean, look at how well behaved she is. No ID or anything, but you know how people are about that in this city. At least we can make sure her leg’s ok and look for her owner?”

“I’m not an animal doctor,” Dean protests, “and I’m definitely not running around after some crazy mutt.”

“You won’t have to lift a finger, Dean. It’s just for a few days, I promise,” Cas pleads. Dean rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, feeling himself relent and resenting himself for it. Cas pushes himself to his feet and wraps his arms around Dean, pulling him in tight. Cas pushes his nose into the short crop of hair at the crown of Dean’s head and Dean can feel his smile. “I love you.”

Dean shakes his head and smiles back. “I love you, too.” The dog leans against his knees and pants up at them. Dean looks down at her. “Your dog is getting mud on my jeans.”

Cas chuckles and pulls away, picking the dog back up and carrying her towards the back yard to wash the mud away and confirm that her leg isn’t broken.

“I was thinking about calling her Pineapple,” Cas says over his shoulder.

“You’re not naming the dog after food,” Dean orders, and Cas rolls his eyes.

~~

Dean rolls out of bed a little after midnight with a groan, an overfilled bladder, and an empty stomach, and steps on a pile of brown and white fur that jumps and yelps quietly.

“Oh, geezus,” Dean yelps, catching himself from stumbling back onto the bed and waking Cas. “What are you doing in the bedroom, dog?”

The dog sniffs apologetically at his feet while Dean scowls and shuffles around her to the bathroom. The dog continues to follow him from the bathroom down to the kitchen, where Dean proceeds to dip leftover potato wedges in hot sauce and devour them. The dog places her head gently on Dean’s knee, her plaintive brown eyes following the movement of potato from the plate to the bowl of hot sauce to Dean’s mouth. Dean narrows his own eyes down at his furry companion and gestures with a potato wedge.

“You can’t judge me, dog. I get enough of that shit from Cas. Crap about midnight snacking making me fat.” Dean pokes the slight layer of pudge around his midsection. “Bullshit.”

The dog whines quietly at the back of her throat. Dean blinks at her, then glances around quickly before breaking off a piece of potato and holding it out to the dog, who snatches it and gulps it down in one quick, eager swallow.

“Don’t tell Cas,” Dean orders her, and the dog responds by placing her head back on Dean’s knee and resuming her observation of the food moving above her.

~~

The good news is the dog is housebroken. The bad news is that the dog seems to have very little understanding of her own bodily functions. She stands next to the back door, barking wildly until Dean or Cas open the door so she can dash out into the yard. She then circles the yard a few times in apparent confusion before barking to be let back in. The cycle repeats every few minutes. All morning long.

“I am straight up going to murder that dog, Cas,” Dean finally yells just before lunch time, watching the dog sniff at a patch of dandelions in the yard, showing no sign of any bodily distress that would warrant the frantic barking of just seconds before. 

“What do you think of naming her Daisy?” Cas calls back from the kitchen, where he’s taking a break from work to make lunch for the two of them. 

Dean opens the door again and an energetic ball of brown and white fur zooms past him and bounces around his legs. He catches himself in the door frame into the kitchen when he trips over a particularly enthusiastic bounce. Dean glares at his husband.

“Stop trying to name the dog, she’s trying to kill me,” Dean scowls darkly. “And her name is definitely not Daisy, anyway.”

“How exactly is she trying to kill you?” Cas looks up from his sandwiches in alarm. 

Dean waves a hand at the dog, who is now sitting sedately next to Cas’s feet and trying her best to catch a glimpse of the food on the kitchen counter.

“I’m going trip over that menace, and fall, and crack my skull open,” Dean explains. Cas stares at his for a long moment, then shakes his head slowly.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he finally says mildly.

“You don’t know that,” Dean sniffs, taking the plate with his sandwich as Cas hands it to him, then searching through the fridge for his bottle of hot sauce.

“If I go down to the shop for a few hours, will the dog still be alive when I get back?”

Dean sits down at the kitchen table with his sandwich and hot sauce. The dog immediately trots over and plops down under the table at his feet, placing her head on Dean’s knee and looking up with the most pathetic eyes she can manage. Dean gives her a grieved look.

“No guarantees,” he tells Cas, smothering his carefully prepared food in spicy goodness.

~~

The dog discovers that there is a miniscule patch of sun on the floor of the living room and proceeds to do her best to curl as much of her body as possible into it and settle in for a nap. The sunlight makes a golden stripe across her nose, where flecks of tan sprinkle over the otherwise white fur of her muzzle like freckles. 

Dean wanders, bored, into the room. He sprawls over one of the squishy brown armchairs in the corner and he watches the dog sleep.

“I thought it would be exciting, you know,” he confesses to the snoozing dog. “When Cas said he wanted to move. New city, new life. I thought moving here would be a chance to start over and be, I don’t know, different somehow.” he snorts. “Yeah, different all right. Now I’m unemployed, and fat, and bored, and stuck alone in a falling apart house talking to a dog that’s not even mine.”

The dog doesn’t stir, just lies quietly in the sun, her side rising and falling slowly with each deep breath. Dean sighs heavily and leans his head against the back of the chair. His breath slowly falls in rhythm with the dogs, deep slow inhales and exhales, and Dean, too, eventually drifts off to sleep.

~~

Something warm and wet is lapping at Dean’s fingers. He blinks his eyes open and looks down his arm to the dog concentrating on bathing his palm and each finger in as much canine saliva as she can manage. Dean jerks his hand away and grimaces at the dog.

“Ew!”

The dog perks up when she sees that Dean is awake. Dean unfolds himself from his chair, observing that maybe an hour has passed since he fell asleep, and the sun has shifted away from the windows, taking the dog’s patch of warmth with it. Dean feels refreshed, and more bored than ever. He washes his hands, then regards the dog, sitting with her head tilted just a little to the right and watching Dean with bright, eager eyes. Dean catches himself smiling back at the friendly little animal.

“Ok, let’s get out of here. My brain is going to melt out of my skull pretty soon, I’m so bored, and maybe if we take a walk around the neighborhood someone will recognize you,” he tells the dog, who tilts her head a little further in an effort to be just that much cuter. Dean rolls his eyes.

There is an old dog collar and a leash in a shoebox under the bed. They haven’t been used since before Dean and Cas got married, but Cas couldn’t bear getting rid of them. The top of the box is covered in a healthy layer of dust. 

Dean opens the box and stares into it. The last owner of the collar had been Cas’s childhood friend, and Dean can still remember how devastated Cas was when the old dog finally died. It was shortly after they started dating, but even years later, Dean can tell the loss left a hole in Cas’s heart.

The dog is watching him from the doorway of the bedroom, respectfully calm and quiet. Dean looks from the old collar to the dog, and back again. He picks up the collar and beckons the dog forward, slipping it over her head and fastening the buckle loosely. The dog cocks her head from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of the new weight around her neck.

“This doesn’t belong to you,” Dean warns her, clipping the leash to the collar. The dog blinks at him. Dean heaves himself from his seat on the floor and the dog follows obediently by his side as he heads towards the front door.

The dog is excited to be outside, and Dean can’t blame her. It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon, just on the right side of warm, and a gentle breeze is rustling the leaves of the trees that line the street. The dog picks a direction to walk and Dean is happy to follow her lead.

The dog rounds a corner and promptly tangles up her leash with an excited French bulldog leading a young woman pushing a fancy jogging stroller. The dogs leap around each other, sniffing and barking greetings, further tangling their leashes.

“I am so sorry,” Dean apologizes, trying to tug at the dog. The woman laughs, and reaches for her frenchie’s collar.

“Don’t worry about it, they’re just being dogs,” she laughs pleasantly. They manage untangle the leashes, but allow the dogs to continue their friendly sniffing. The woman looks Dean up and down. “Are you new to the neighborhood? I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”

“Um, kind of, I guess? Me and my husband moved in a few months ago,” Dean explains, gesturing back towards their dumpy little house around the corner.

“Oh, that’s great! You’re planning on fixing up the house? That place has been sitting there forever, it could use some love.”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “It’s definitely a fixer-upper.” 

“It’ll be worth it. Me and my husband did the same when we moved. But if you need a break from the housework, you should bring your dog down to the park next Tuesday, me and some of the other ladies always meet up at the dog park around 2,” the woman offers. Dean jolts a little at the invitation. Before he can explain the dog isn’t his, the baby in the stroller starts to fuss. The woman immediately bends down to lift away the little curtain protecting the baby from the late afternoon sun. Dean peers around her to catch a glimpse of a fat infant face scrunched up in displeasure.

“Sorry,” the woman chuckles. “He’s probably getting hungry, it’s almost dinner time. We better head home. I’m Mellie, by the way,” she introduces herself, sticking out the hand that’s not holding on to her dog’s leash. Dean takes it and smiles.

“Dean,” he replies. 

“Don’t forget about the dog park, Dean!” the woman calls as she pushes the stroller and tugs her dog off down the street. Dean smiles and waves, then looks down at the dog, whose tongue is once again lolling out of the side of her mouth as she looks up at Dean with a lopsided smile. Dean narrows his eyes.

“Don’t give me that look. I’m onto you,” he tells the dog.

They walk a few blocks down, in the direction of the park the woman mentioned. They are passing by a dilapidated old house surrounded by a rotten-looking wood fence when someone shouts from across the street.

“Hey, isn’t that Old Man Crowley’s dog?”

Dean freezes, and looks around at the scrawny teenager gawking at him.

“You recognize this dog?” he asks, and the boy shrugs.

“Looks kinda like Old Man Crowley’s. I dunno, he always kept the dog locked up in the yard.” They boy points at the run down house and the broken fence. Dean stares at the residence, feeling a squirming sensation in his gut.

“I think she might have run away, my husband found her on the street last night,” Dean finally admits. “Do you know if - uh - Mr. Crowley is home?”

“Nah, he kicked it a few weeks ago. Nobody’s been in the house since the body guys came to take him away.” 

“Oh. Ok, thanks,” Dean says, and the boy shrugs again in response before turning away. Dean looks over the neglected house again, and spots a broken part of the fence a little ways back, the rotten wood boards pushed away, and dirt scooped out from underneath. Just the size and shape for a medium sized dog who was locked away in the yard after his owner died to wiggle under and escape.

~~

Dean makes dinner that night, after stripping the dog of the old collar and leash and placing them carefully back in their shoebox under the bed. The dog follows him around the kitchen, getting under his feet and threatening to trip him, occasionally taking a break to run to the back door and bark to be let out into the yard. Dean mostly ignores her. He only very occasionally slips a scrap of food from the counter into the dog’s waiting mouth.

“Rae!” Cas shouts the instant he opens the front door. He appears in the kitchen a few seconds later. Dean lifts an eyebrow as he looks up at him from the stove. “The dog’s name. Rae.”

Dean and the dog both just stare silently at him. Cas holds up his hands and scowls at them. 

“Or not.” 

Cas steps around the dog to give Dean a sloppy, wet kiss on the cheek. 

“Agh! You’re worse than the dog with the slobber,” Dean cries, wiping his cheek on his shoulder. Cas chuckles and pecks his again, dryly this time. 

“Nobody claimed her,” Cas says, inspecting the food cooking on the stove. “I guess I can start looking for a good animal shelter tomorrow.”

“Sure, that’s probably a good idea,” Dean says, carefully avoiding looking at the fluffy ball of white and tan climbing under the kitchen table and lying down with her tail curled around her.

~~

Cas goes into work early the next day, leaving Dean and the dog home alone with each other. The dog is exactly the same, spotted and fluffy, constantly underfoot, always barking to be let out and in, curling up in every patch of sun she can find. Dean just rolls his eyes and goes with it.

It’s late morning when Dean realizes that he let the dog out into the yard a while ago, but hasn’t heard the inevitable barking demanding to come back in. He tries to calculate exactly how long it’s been. Too long.

Dean drops the tape measure he was using to size up the downstairs bathroom and opens the back door. Just to check. The dog isn’t in the yard. The dog isn’t in the house. Dean checks both places again. No dog. His heart starts to thump rapidly against his ribs and he takes a few deep breaths. 

Then he checks the house and the yard again. Still no dog. his heart thunders as he rushes for the shoebox under the bed, grabbing the collar and leash and clutching them tightly in one hand as he dashes out onto the street.

Dean keeps his eyes peeled for any flash of white or tan fur as he combs the sidewalk. He’s wild-eyed and panting when he bursts in through the door of Cas’ bookshop, and a few customers give his nervous glances from the corners of their eyes. Cas is behind the counter and he hurries over as soon as he catches a glimpse of Dean.

“Dean! What’s wrong!”

“It’s Amelie,” he wails, allowing Cas to lead his by the elbow into the back room and settle him into a metal folding chair.

“Who?”

“Amelie! The dog!”

“You named the dog? When?”

Dean glares at him.

“That’s her name,” he grumbles in lieu of a real answer.

Cas shakes his head and crouches down so they are eye level. His gaze catches on the collar and leash clutched tightly in Dean’s hands. His expression softens and he slides his hands over Dean’s, loosening the clench of his fingers.

“Of course. What happened to Amelie?”

“She’s missing. I think she got out of the backyard.” 

“Ok,” Cas reasons, “ok, we’ll find her.”

~~

Cas leaves the bookshop to the capable hands of Hannah, the assistant manager, and both Dean and Cas hit the streets. They choose different directions and jog away, calling for the dog and searching every corner of the streets.

Dean is ready to give up when he spots Cas leading a familiar white and brown figure, panting, bright-eyed, covered in dry dirt with brown burs clinging to her fur, absolutely unapologetic about the pain her adventure caused.

Amelie bounces towards him happily, transferring burs from her fur to Dean’s jeans, and Dean scowls down at the dog. 

“It’s not enough that I have to fix up this dump of a house, I have to have a dog messing shit up at the same time?” he mourns, plopping down onto the front steps to wrap his arms around Amelie’s neck, and the dog wiggles into his embrace. “This is a terrible idea.”

Dean leans his cheek against the dog’s head, his arms still latched around the warm, furry body rubbing dirt all over him, and he glares up at his husband.

“I blame you,” Dean tells him.

“For the dog or the house?” Cas chuckles, sitting down on the step, Amelie wedged in between the two humans.

“Both.”

Cas ruffles Dean’s hair, then Amelie’s and grins.

“I can live with that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Say hi on [tumblr](http://jailikechai.tumblr.com).


End file.
